Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari held peace talks with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday which for the first time featured top spy chiefs. The summit at Cameron’s Chequers country retreat near London is aimed at boosting cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, amid growing fears that a civil war could erupt when international troops leave Afghanistan in 2014. “This trilateral process sends a very clear message to the Taliban -- now is the time for everyone to participate in a peaceful political process in Afghanistan,” a British government spokeswoman said. snip The president...

(ISLAMABAD) -- Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is hoping to head off a potential military coup by imploring Pakistanis to reject attempts at usurping democracy. Zardari made his remarks Tuesday in southern Sindh province on the fourth anniversary of the assassination of his late wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto had just returned from exile two months earlier and was rumored to be seeking a return to power when she was slain on Dec. 27, 2007. [Snip] Zardari has always had uneasy relations with Pakistan's powerful military and his camp believes they will either try to remove him by...

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari traveled to Dubai for medical tests on his heart after falling ill, officials and associates said Wednesday, triggering Twitter-fueled rumors that the under-pressure leader may be stepping down.

Storm gathers over Pakistan "coup" memo Anita Joshua Pakistan's Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani is reported to have tendered his resignation on Wednesday (American time) following allegations that he had submitted a memo on behalf of President Asif Ali Zardari to former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen to pre-empt a possible coup in the wake of the May 2 operation against al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. However, several hours after news broke of the resignation offer made during the night (Pakistani time), there was no word from the Government on whether it had been accepted or not....

AFP - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was expected in Moscow on Wednesday for talks with Russian leaders on his first major foreign visit since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will host Zardari for talks on Thursday at the Kremlin where officials from the two countries were also expected to sign agreements on cooperation in agriculture, aviation and energy, a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Moscow told AFP. "Economics will be the focus of the visit," said the spokesman, Raja Abdul Qayyum. The three-day visit to Russia will be Zardari's first...

Zardari took 'massive secret commissions' for securing French submarine deal: Report 2011-01-15 16:00:00 Official Pakistani documents, detailing how President Asif Ali Zardari benefited from massive, secret payments connected to the sale of French submarines to Pakistan, have been seized as evidence by a Paris magistrate investigating a suspected widespread scam surrounding the deal. The documents, published by Mediapart, show that the payments to Zardari and others took place on the fringes of the sale of three Agosta-class submarines by the French defence contractor, the DCN, to Pakistan in the 1990s. The French sale, which succeeded against rival offers by Swedish...

More than £300 million in foreign aid for victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake has been diverted by President Asif Zardari's government to other causes, officials have told The Daily Telegraph. They now fear that the alleged diversion of funds will deter donors from giving further aid after the country's devastating floods. According to senior officials, schools, hospitals, houses and roads planned with money given by foreign governments and international aid groups remain unbuilt almost five years after the earthquake which killed 80,000 and left four million people homeless. International donors gave £3.5 billion to rebuild vast swaths of Pakistan's...

Political forces in Pakistan want the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency to be placed under civilian control but the matter has been put on the backburner for the time being, President Asif Ali Zardari has said. "The political forces want the ISI should be brought under civilian control but for the time being, this matter has been shelved," Zardari said in an interview with a TV news channel. He did not give the reasons for the issue being shelved. The government led by Zardari's Pakistan People's Party had attempted to place the ISI under the control of the interior ministry in...

Suspicions by Pakistan's powerful army that the country's civilian leadership is growing too close to the United States are fueling a political crisis that analysts here believe threatens the survival of the government and could divert attention from the battle against Islamic extremists. Military officials believe that secretly taped conversations between Pakistani President Asif Zardari and his ambassador in Washington, prove that it was at Zardari's insistence that a $1.5 billion U.S. aid package passed by Congress in September contained several provisions that angered the Pakistani military. The military publicly protested the aid package last month. "The reaction (from the...

Report: Pakistani president suspected of graft in submarine sale South Asia News Nov 10, 2009, 10:56 GMT Paris - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is suspected of having received millions of dollars in kickbacks from the 1994 sale of three French submarines to the Pakistani Navy, the daily Liberation reported Tuesday. In addition, investigators believe that the non-payment of the full amount of the agreed kickbacks may have led to the deaths of 11 French nationals in a 2002 terror attack in the city of Karachi. In the report, Liberation says it acquired documents that allegedly show that Zardari received...

Pakistanis Reject U.S. Partnership By JANE PERLEZ Published: September 30, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Even with the arrival of the Obama administration and the prospect of substantially increased aid, more Pakistanis — an overwhelming majority — continued to reject the United States as a partner to fight militancy in their country, a new poll finds. The survey, conducted by the Washington-based International Republican Institute, underscored the difficulties the Obama administration faced in its efforts to tamp down Islamic militancy in this strategically vital nation. The I.R.I. is a nonprofit pro-democracy group affiliated with the Republican Party and financed by the...

ISLAMABAD — President Asif Ali Zardari plans to celebrate the coming Eidul Fitr in New York and attend the UN General Assembly and Friends of Democratic Pakistan Summit. - President Zardari along with his entourage would celebrate Eidul Fitr in the USA where he has a scheduled meeting with US President Baraak Obama at FoDP summit on September 24.

14-year jail for SMS joke on Pakistani president IANS 19 July 2009, 08:52pm IST ISLAMABAD: It would seem that in Pakistan, there is nothing you need to watch out for more than making a joke about President Asif Ali Zardari by SMS (Short Messaging Service). If you mistakenly, or just for fun, share with a friend one of the hundreds of derisory jokes about the leader floating around electronically, you could get a 14-year prison sentence. Pakistan's interior minister Rehman Malik announced last week that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has been tasked to trace SMS (or text messages) and...

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has alleged that elusive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was a US operator who had tried to destabilise his late wife Benazir Bhutto’s government back in 1989. In fact, as premier Bhutto had “warned America about Osama bin Laden in 1989 with a call to then US president George H. Bush”, Zardari said on NBC’s Meet the Press programme Sunday. “She rang senior Bush and asked of him: ‘Are you destabilizing my government?’ because he (apparently referring to bin Laden) paid the then opposition $10 million to overthrow the first woman elected (prime minister)...

WASHINGTON: In a new revelation, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said that the CIA of the United States and his country's ISI together created the Taliban. "I think it was part of your past and our past, and the ISI and CIA created them together," Zardari told the NBC news channel in an interview. In the interview, which was given to the NBC on May 7, Zardari also accused the US of supporting the military rule of Pervez Musharraf who was alleged to be taking sides of the Taliban. He disagreed with the popular belief in the US that...

A top private risk analysis firm gave embattled Pakistan a three-in-ten chance of a military coup even before the latest offensive by Taliban rebels, according to a noted US analyst. New York-based Eurasiagroup, whose head of research is top former State Department, White House National Security Council and CIA official David F Gordon, said in a little noticed, late April report that it was more than possible the Pakistani Army would step in to stabilise the rebel-threatened country. The premise of Eurasiagroup's "scenario" is that "the global economic crisis proves too much to handle for the political leadership in Pakistan",...

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said that all madrassas in the country would be taken over by the government to separate the students from extremism and impart modern as well as religious education to them. Speaking at a community dinner, Zardari said his government has resolved to bring reforms in the madrassa system and bring it under the government system. Commenting on the ongoing military operation in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) against the Taliban and other terrorist groups Zardari said the government would initiate every necessary step to pull the country out of the crisis and hand...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari denied his nuclear-armed nation was on the verge of collapse as top US officials Sunday welcomed his government's bloody military offensive against the Taliban. "Is the state of Pakistan going to collapse?" Zardari said in an NBC interview aired Sunday, after White House talks last week with President Barack Obama that were also attended by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "No. We are 180 million people. There the population is much, much more than the insurgents are," Zardari said, fending off a mounting clamor against his leadership from US lawmakers. Karzai had his...

Here is video from an interview done by Meet the Press host David Gregory with Pakistan's President Asif Zardari that will air this weekend. Gregory asks Zardari if he believes Osama Bin Laden is alive, and Zardari says he DOES NOT believe that he is. He was evasive when asked if his government is actively looking for Bin Laden, saying only that "the world" is looking for him. You sure don't get the feeling watching this that he is going to be much of a reliable ally for the United States. I would guess the Taliban are licking their chops...

US President Barack Obama must press visiting Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to accept more help in securing US aid to secure his country's nuclear arsenal, a top senator said Wednesday. ‘He must convince President Zardari to accept more assistance and embrace cooperation,’ said Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lugar, a leading US foreign policy voice, cited global concerns that unrest in Pakistan could lead to its nuclear weapons, or the raw materials for chemical or biological weapons, ‘falling into the wrong hands.’ ‘President Obama must use this opportunity to gain clarification...